Latest Blog Posts

It can be useful to think of a software system as a physical space or geography. There are small towns inside of larger regions.
Things have neighbours and things within a neighbourhood tend to be related. You might notice this when people talk about things being far or near. For example: “This change will have far reaching effects” or “This method should move closer to that class”.

Yesterday marked the end of another spectacular HackDays at Shopify. HackDays is a magical event we have at Shopify once per quarter. Every employee gets the chance to pitch any project they want that will benefit our customers, ourselves, or our community. People join whatever project interests them the most and then they have two days to get together, design an MVP, and ship it!

The Elm programming language offers the best of functional programming in the browser. Elm was my introduction to using a static, strong type system. Adjusting to using types wasn’t easy at first, but as I continue to explore Elm I find that my programming style is changing for the better.

Here is a quick tip for restricting a number in Elm. I came across an interesting function in the standard library while building a form with some number inputs. I wanted to keep the numbers entered by the user restricted to a known range. Consider the following code:

In this post I discuss my exploration of functional programming in 2015 and walk through some of the basic ideas using JavaScript for code examples. Skip to the bottom for a huge list of interesting links!

Find inspiration for your next story or role playing game! "Here Be Taverns" generates random fantasy taverns to suit your mood and your story's setting. Read on for a discussion about what I learned building this super fun Ruby on Rails application.

It’s official: On March 9, 2015 I will be starting my new job as a front end developer at Shopify. I couldn’t be more excited about it and I want to talk about why I’m so excited and why I am making this transition.

I started my career in the web industry as a web designer. I was totally in love with HTML and CSS and could write some really basic JavaScript. I spent most of my time thinking about the visual design of a webpage.